Bryan C. Fleming

I had a left over gift certificate and thought I'd buy one of these things. But before spending $200 at Home-Depot to buy one, I had one question “How well could it possibly work”?

For those of you who don’t know what the Roomba is, it’s simply a robotic vacuum. It’s supposed to wander through your home cleaning your wood floors so you don’t have to. Nice.

I am very impressed with this little guy and wanted post a quick review of it on my blog.

To start with, the Roomba isn’t a very powerful vacuum, but more than makes up for it in sheer work. The Roomba randomly feels its way through your house cleaning as it goes. It bumps into walls a lot, turns and goes another way. Now, you would expect it to have a systematic cleaning of some sorts, but it’s purely random. Let it run long enough and it will cover every square inch of your house.

In the beginning, Sherry and I found it quite strange to have this mechanical intelligent machine roaming through our home. It was strange in that unlike a vacuum or anything else mechanical you didn’t need to baby-sit it. It just did its thing.

Even more impressive is how long it can run on a charge. I would expect a ½ hour maybe, but the Roomba runs a lot longer than that. It comes with a home-base where it docks and recharges itself. This works well.

Now your home needs to have mostly wood floors for the Roomba to be effective. It doesn’t do very well on Carpet, but surprisingly knows how to unstick itself from rugs if the vacuum gets caught.

People ask if it falls down stairs. I haven’t seen it do this yet. It has a sensor that stops it from making such a fatal mistake. I’ve seen this work well too.
If you have hard-wood floors you know they need constant cleaning. The Roomba is well worth the $200. Oh yes, I forgot to mention. The Roomba is very entertaining to watch. Great job Irobot.

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Forgot I had this blog......In fact I didn't check it for a year...

Today I thought "Man I gotta start writing in that old blog I had". I come here and it's been Exactly 1 year since my last post...

God is certainly telling me something....

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